Out of the void

WE'D all like to get something for nothing. But harnessing the energy of empty space?

It sounds crazy, but the idea is not so far-fetched, thanks to a strange force that comes out of nothing. Researchers have persuaded this force, called the Casimir effect, to slide tiny gold plates past each other. "This should help us exploit this fundamental force on a tiny scale," says Umar Mohideen, a physicist at the University of California, Riverside.

The Casimir effect depends on the fact that on tiny scales, empty space isn't empty at all. Even a total vacuum is filled with a quantum froth of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. They don't last long enough for us to detect them directly, but in 1948 the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted that if you put two parallel plates close enough together so that the largest particles can't squeeze into ...

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